In their spare time after work and on the weekends, three tech-savvy guys in Petaluma, Calif., in about six months have managed to surmount a technical hurdle that the multibillion-dollar U.S. wireless industry has not yet resolved after more than a year of effort.
Paul Higgins and his two partners manage PixToPix, a service that allows camera-phone users to send picture messages to subscribers of rival carriers. The offering, available free, delivers camera-phone images from one handset model to another and from one network to another, quickly and relatively simply.
“There’s a need. The cell-phone providers for the most part aren’t offering this,” said Higgins, PixToPix’s chief technology officer and founder. “We’re filling a need.”
In its first few months of availability PixToPix has scored more than 3,000 users. The company conducted no advertising; PixToPix’s growth is due to word-of-mouth alone. The service is available through the company’s Internet site, PixToPix.com, and allows users to send and receive inter-carrier picture messages within minutes of filling out a short registration form.
PixToPix is notable because the U.S. wireless industry has been offering picture-messaging services for almost two years but has yet to launch intercarrier messaging functions. Thus, subscribers of Verizon Wireless, Sprint PCS and others can send picture messages only to users of the same carrier. The situation is reminiscent of the early days of text messaging in the United States, when messages could travel only inside a carrier’s network.
“There have been some technological hurdles” in launching intercarrier picture messaging services, said Jeffrey Nelson, a Verizon Wireless spokesman. “We have every incentive in the world … to get interoperability up and running.”
Nelson said Verizon saw its text-messaging traffic triple the day after it launched intercarrier text-messaging services, an increase that occurred without the benefit of advertising. Nelson said Verizon is working hard to settle the technological issues surrounding intercarrier picture messaging and could offer interoperable services with a handful of other carriers within the next few months. Indeed, a variety of agencies have been working on the issue, including the Open Mobile Alliance, the GSM Association and the CDMA Development Group.
The CDG and the 3G Americas association last week released a set of technical and service-level requirement guidelines for multimedia routing, MMS relay/server connectivity and multimedia charging for picture-messaging interoperability. Firms including Comverse Technology Inc., LightSurf Technologies Inc., InphoMatch Inc. and others offer picture-messaging interoperability products.
“Sprint is working with the other carriers in the industry for MMS interoperability standards,” said Sprint PCS spokeswoman Suzanne Lammers. Sprint was the first U.S. carrier to launch integrated camera phones in late 2002, and has since clocked more than 100 million video and picture messages traveling its network. Sprint’s customers can send and receive picture messages from Bell Mobility customers in Canada; both carriers use MMS technology from LightSurf.
New research shows that the lack of interoperability could lead to declining numbers of picture-messaging users. According to Zelos Group’s new consumer survey, 12 percent of respondents indicated strong interest in picture messaging compared with 20 percent in a similar survey last year. Zelos Group said the decline could be because the “actual experience with use of these services was less positive compared to how they were promoted.”
Higgins said the idea for PixToPix came to him last year, when he tried to send a picture message to his girlfriend.
“You can’t do it if you have different carriers,” he said. “I thought, `Wait, this is something people would want.’ “
Several months later, Higgins and his two partners launched PixToPix. The group-which includes the president of a California Internet service provider, a computer software engineer and an Internet network engineer-manages the company outside their daytime jobs, and network capacity is on loan from a friend. Higgins said MMS-multimedia messaging services-is essentially just an e-mail service with a picture attached, and PixToPix basically translates the e-mail into the language of a given carrier. However, Higgins said intercarrier picture messaging is no easy feat; he and his two partners have the networking and technological backgrounds necessary for such work.
PixToPix supports picture translation among Verizon Wireless, Sprint, AT&T Wireless Services Inc., T-Mobile USA Inc., Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and Bell Mobility in Canada. Higgins said PixToPix is also working to add the rest of the industry’s major players, including Alltel Corp., Telus and others.
PixToPix users sign up to receive intercarrier picture messages by registering their phone numbers on the PixToPix Internet site. Users then must get their friends, family and co-workers to send camera-phone images to their PixToPix account, which is either your-phone-number@pixtopix.com or your-name@pixtopix.com. When a picture message is sent to a PixToPix user, the PixToPix service intercepts the message, strips it down to the basics and then reformats it into a message suitable for the receiver’s wireless phone and service.
This method works for all of the carriers except Sprint and Bell Mobility, Higgins explained, because they use picture-messaging technology from LightSurf. Under the LightSurf picture-messaging system, users receive a link to a picture that is actually stored on a server, and users must access the server to view their picture messages. To translate such messages for subscribers of other carriers, the PixToPix service must extract the image from the LightSurf system and then store it on PixToPix’s own server, thus allowing the company to reformat the message and send it on to a user of another carrier. To send a picture message to a Sprint or Bell Mobility user through the PixToPix service, the company first must store the message on its server and then send a link to a Sprint or Bell Mobility user with the location of the image.
So what’s next for Higgins and his two partners? Higgins said the company plans to add additional features such as a picture-hosting service that would allow users to post their images on the Internet as a sort of mobile blog. Higgins said the company is also looking to raise some venture capital and then, ultimately, sell its service to the nation’s carriers and thus solve the intercarrier messaging dilemma.
